I’m not planning on doing the whole document in such tedious detail, but the opening bits are really chewy.\n
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.<\/blockquote>\nOK first of all, what does it mean for something to be self-evident<\/I>? When I use the word, I generally mean something like obvious<\/I> with a connotation that the obviousness is prima facie<\/I>. That is, I might say that the evidence of Sousa-style military march music on the New Orleans jazz of Louis Armstrong is self-evident<\/I>, meaning that you can hear it right away, and don’t need to bother with doing much research. In fact, I almost always use the word negatively, saying that something is claimed to be self-evident which is not, or that something that appears self-evident is in fact false. The universe is more complicated than first glance indicates. Now, I can’t say that it is evident to me at all that all men are created equal<\/I>, and certainly it isn’t obvious. It isn’t obvious to me that Governments are created among men<\/I> for the purpose of securing certain Rights. It may be so, but it would require a good deal of evidence, and frankly I would be inclined to say that there’s a lot more going on there.\n
There are a couple of other shades of meaning that Mr. Jefferson may have had in mind. First, self-evident is a term of art in philosophy, and although I don’t claim to understand it properly, I suspect Mr. Jefferson did. As near as I can make out and rephrase, to say a statement is self-evident means that its truth does not rely on evidence external to the statement itself. “I call myself Vardibidian” is something of a self-evident statement; if I didn’t call myself Vardibidian before saying that, I did while saying it. In other words, to describe a statement as self-evident releases you from the obligation to provide evidence. Thus, Mr. Jefferson can state that it is the purpose of Government to secure rights equally to all men, and claim that it is self-evident (perhaps due to an implied definition of Government that includes that purpose), and dispense with an analysis of the history of government and rights.\n
I should also add that dictionaries and thesaurussessii seem to claim that self-evident is a synonym both for obvious<\/I> and axiomatic<\/I>. Those are two very different things. It is axiomatic<\/I> that any straight line segment can be extended indefinitely in a straight line, but it is far from obvious. What the obvious has in common with the axiomatic is that you cannot argue with them. They are undeniable. Well, except of course that the obvious is often wrong, and an axiom can be rejected (and a new argument made from a new axiom). But what obvious<\/I> and axiomatic<\/I> have in common with self-evident<\/I> in the philosophical sense is that they all encompass a sense of undeniable<\/I>. I think that, ultimately, is what Mr. Jefferson (et al) are going for, here. They have already claimed the authority of unanimity, and also the authority of decency, and now they claim the authority of undeniability. OK, that’s not a word. But the background here is all decent people think this way<\/I>, so you should agree. In fact, you should not agree, you should just accept and then move on. After all, these are truths. You don’t want to argue with truths, do you?\n
Again, all I want to do here is point out the way in which before making any argument at all, a call for revolution has positioned itself as simple, reasonable, lawyerly and even scientific, and most of all a matter of intellectual truth. Undeniable. And it does so immediately before making amazingly bold and ballsy statements. People have the right to depose a king? To choose their own method of governance? Don’t you have to have evidence for shit like that? No, you don’t, not if you position yourself correctly beforehand.\n
More later on the rest of the paragraph. Maybe I’ll get through it all someday.\n
chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I\u2019m not planning on doing the whole document in such tedious detail, but the opening bits are really chewy. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[201],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10015","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-navel-gazing"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10015","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10015"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10015\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17558,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10015\/revisions\/17558"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10015"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10015"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10015"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}